[This week we thought we’d share an interview with artist, Dominique de Varine, who calls Brittany home, but who we met in the Tibetan colonies of Northern India.]
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Mutable: I think a good place to start our conversation is Dharma and Karma, as this was where our conversation began. What is the relationship between Dharma and Karma in your work? Has it always been this way or has their relationship evolved over time? And also, was there a time when these concepts were not important to your work and some moment when they became more so?
Dominique de Varine: Karma, Dharma, I don't know what they are! I do have some ideas of course but fleeting ones that fade over time. When I started working on the series "Galipettes," the question it seemed capable of answering was that of emptiness. Over time, an echoing fullness invited itself in, playing an equal and dialectical role. A semiotic reading complements it, involving the opposition between engagement (narrative) and disengagement (narrative). Emptiness, disengagement in the here and now. Fullness, engagement in all the formations of the world. Hence, the Dharma and the Karma.
M: How have Buddhist concepts in general informed your work over your career and how have they not?
DdV: I have been reading Buddhist texts, often Tibetan ones, since the end of my adolescence. I have always done so, sporadically, with a certain capacity for forgetting. The weeks I have just spent, somewhat by chance, among so many monkeys and so many monks, with the Tibetan exiles in northern India, at the foothills of the Himalayas, have been a slow process of clarification for me.
M: In what order?
DdV: I was struck by the revelation that something buried, perhaps a quality, a vibration deeply rooted in Buddhism, was at work in my work. I'm not just talking about my artistic research, but also semiotics. My grounding in my original culture had hidden this fact from me. I hadn't realized how much this attraction to Buddhism had permeated and worked its way into the roots of my artistic practice. However, I don't know if I am a Buddhist artist because I don't plan my work in terms of specific research. To be honest, I have never sought anything. I have always let things come to me.
M: What other ideas do you bring to your work? How do they relate to ideas like Karma and Dharma?
DdV: The life of forms has always interested me, from primeval worlds to contemporary societies, and that is my primary background. I did not attend an art school; I am a semiotician, and the theoretical baggage came from there. The so-called Parisian school of semiotics, developed around the work of A.-J. Greimas, lies at the intersection of linguistics, anthropology, and phenomenology. It has a structural essence, which also bridges with the Buddhist approach to the conditions of existence. Another influence has been Guy Debord's critique of the Society of the Spectacle. However, we didn't discuss Buddhism or Guy Debord at Greimas's seminar, and these three poles of influence remained separate.
M: How did you get started on the path you are on now?
DdV: The artistic vocation gradually came to be thrust upon me, nourished by my encounters and wanderings. As I mentioned, I have always looked at everything, from street art to antique furniture, from nature to consumer objects. I don't know where this attraction to the avant-garde in its many forsm has come from; I am spontaneously drawn in---from Malevich to minimalism and Donald Judd, from Arte Povera to Marcel Duchamp. They interested me not so much on a theoretical level, which I remained impervious to for a long time, but on a perceptual level. "Looking" is the keyword. In their approaches to the living, avant-garde movements have a desire to push the boundaries, an idea of surpassing, of abolishing certain frontiers that make them distinctive markers. They resonate with certain contemporary research endeavors.
M: You have spoken of nature and culture. Could you go further into these concepts and how they inform your work?
DdV: This attraction to radicality has always been balanced by my love for so-called "primitive" arts, particularly Hopi art and the paintings of the Huichol Indians from the Mexican mountains. And through my visits to the old Guimet Museum, the grand Parisian museum for Asian arts. For me, this attraction to radicality and love for forms considered by some as outdated go hand in hand. Although these forms of art are of different nature, the avant-garde and so-called "primitive" cultures may not be as far apart as one might think. They share a common characteristic in that they stem from an exploration of the life of forms, which, on the one hand, is characterized by the autonomy and perfection of their respective unfoldings, while on the other hand, they pose (sometimes dialectically) and transcend the values of nature and culture.
© Seymour Chase Dugowson
M: Then a question. In general, where would you place yourself as an artist ?
DdV: I don't know. I don't consider myself a radical artist or an avant-garde artist. Those notions are outdated today, partly linked to the same sun, modernity. One of the satellites of this sun is the art market. Nowadays, the words "art" and "artist" are loaded, they no longer correspond to much. Anyway, when a fisherman goes trout fishing, does he call himself a fisherman? It is others who give him that name. One must remain nameless, be humble, timid, transparent, and discreet like the Facteur Cheval.
M: Should one resist the art market?
DdV: Do not resist the art market; it imprisons you. It becomes a matter of struggle for survival or positioning. So when excellence is achieved, it often comes at the cost of life paths that contradict the writings and readings of our youth. Do not resist the art market, do not be a part of it, or at the very least, maintain a certain distance.
M: How would you describe the French art scene currently?
DdV: In France, the proliferation of major Parisian institutions, both private and public, the role of the state and private institutions at all levels and stages of the art ecosystem, have not only distorted the game but also the values. I am not very familiar with the international situation, but the fact that art has become so globalized and to such an extent, almost as a new norm, is not appealing. The artists from whom I draw inspiration, those who give the rare impression of living their art, exist outside the institutionalized art circuit. Most of them have been well acquainted with it.
M: Is there anyone who stands out as especially interesting?
DdV: The Chauvet Cave, 34,000 years old according to archaeologists, discovered at the very end of the twentieth century. There is this profession of faith of those privileged enough to have visited it: it appears so fresh that the painter must have just left there, perhaps hiding behind a rock. Because, concerning Chauvet, the pinnacle of what is called art---this tag for a drawer, this label for death---is mysteriously, as if by a magician's trick, a conjurer's, a madman's, armed with powerful irony. Yes, the pinnacle of what is called art is also the oldest known form of pictorial representation.
M: You seem to be discussing the notion of art itself. Can you come back to this idea?
DdV: One must take the codes and fuse them from within. The word "art" was invented, as well as the word "artist." It's not that they have become obsolete, but these notions have not always existed and do not always exist. I don't know if the artists who interest me are artists. Yes, certainly, but what then? They do not belong to this proactive time. The system has made that clear to them, and it's fine. It's also that the stakes have shifted. Artists, curators, institutions, critics, the public, collectors, each one is seeking a new position in a global context where the sense of exhaustion brought about by modernity parallels the sense of environmental and climate urgency. Chris Burden beautifully echoed this in his series of French exhibitions. But art, art for art's sake, few still care about it. And time. An artwork unfolds over time, where it truly gains its magnitude, and in retreat. Furthermore, the emergence of Asia in the art market, particularly India and China, has systematized its bourgeois character of integration, accompanying the latest fashionable handbag or car. Or, worse, the very forms of social control: recently, in France, one can find on the roadside a speed camera that truly makes you wonder if it was not designed by one of the trendiest French artists of the moment, and one of the institution’s more supported artists. Art, following religion, has lost its speculative intellectual value and appears trapped by issues of image, strategy, money, current affairs, and power. This is exactly, I believe, what many actors in fundamental research complain about in the world.
M: What is art for, according to you?
DdV: Art, today, has largely and globally shifted towards decorating reality. But art serves another purpose. It serves to inform reality, quite literally: to give it form. Not to decorate reality or to challenge big or small bourgeois fears.
M: How was your childhood in relation to art?
DdV: I remember having tried some things as a teenager and being shocked from the depths of my Breton castle when I learned that art schools existed, which my old-school aristocratic parents, with a foot in modernity, wisely restrained me from joining. They never stopped me from anything again, and I even played Blue Oyster Cult at full volume in my room above theirs. I arrived in Paris a bit of a scavenger, somewhat anxious, lost and outside the established codes, unsure of myself and stuttering, in a Latin Quarter that was blowing its final embers. I quickly made artist friends and started frequenting galleries, the emerging scene at the time. I began to experiment, and it evolved into something like minimalism. And then, after a few years, a kind of dream emerged and after six months, a Galipette came to life. It took three weeks for the idea of recreating Galipette to finally impose itself by chance. That's when the concept of the series slowly unfolded, like morphogenesis, the seed growing into a tree. It's a mental and physical apprehension, a strange sensation, a memory now. But still, as I unknowingly lie at the foot of this tree, I taste its fruits. The great shyness that made me stutter and blush excessively for a long time gradually faded away. I started showing my work and telling myself that the game was not yet won. And then, after a few years, friends started pointing out that I had been doing squares for quite some time, just as Piet Mondrian listened to his horizontals and verticals. Most people don't understand my work. They get stuck on the square, which is just one element of the overall syntax. What is important is what happens within and outside the square, as well as within and outside the rectangle of the painting.
M: In your work, what is the relationship between square and rectangle?
DdV: From an object taken from the course of things, samsara in its perpetual renewal, a blank or already painted canvas, a piece of paper (often from a newspaper), a box of chocolates, a rock, an industrial object, etc., I extract or introduce a rectangular surface. From this surface, through the use of the square, I extract a resonating material: a simple subtraction, absence, a somewhat alchemical path. Just like in yoga, the idea is to stabilize. It is important to understand that the rectangle is taken from the world, not artificially like a canvas to be painted, but as a potential painting already there, to be picked and realized as a square. Similarly, in the science of language, we distinguish between states of virtualization of meaning, its states of actualization, and then realization.
M: What is the relationship of the squares to the artwork as a whole? Does it change from one composition to another?
DdV: The square is not a trivial shape, as it is the finest and simplest expression of culture. Hence, the black square of Malevich, Rothko, etc., who explore it like poets, with their painter's tools. In your poet's laboratory, with your brushes and your colors for a microscope, you extract your equation, and your equation tells you square = culture, with this latent association between culture and immanence. Me, that's where I start from—I take the square, I pierce it and observe what the champagne bubble is doing on the surface.
M: But the rectangle?
DdV: Well, people think I make squares, but they're mistaken. I make rectangles. The question is not so much about the square itself, but about the rectangle that accommodates this square: where does it come from, what function has our Western world given it that still remains so transparent? Marcel Duchamp said about painting (and of the picture) that it is a Delayed Effect. He meant on life. This question of the effect is at the heart of my work. In that sense, I am not a conceptual artist but rather an artist gardener, if I may say so. So, if it helps to move things forward, let's say that deep down I might be a little Buddhist at my Western core.
M: How are the square and the rectangle concretely linked?
DdV: They are concretely linked to each other through a relationship of subtraction. The plasticity of the system is quite extensive, and its modes of realization are manifold. But above all, this system induces towards the void (the "informed square") a principle not so much of equivalence as of vibration, a dynamic perspective that connects the "informed" rectangle to the "informed" square. This creates a kind of logic disengaged from the category of immanence.
M: How would you explain your work to an art student, an alien, a child?
DdV: To an art student, I ask to observe the effects of decantation like a winemaker; to an Alien, I ask if we agree; to a child, simply to look and remain deaf to any sort of explanation.
